The continued development of computers and computer network hardware and the resulting increased processing speeds and data transmission rates have led to huge increases in the amount of data moved across such networks. While data transmission rates continue to increase, these large amounts of data must be handled by processors that are equally burdened by other tasks, all of which require increased processing power. One approach to addressing the increased processor workload stemming from increased data communications loads is to offload some of the data communications functions to dedicated hardware.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,697,868 discusses allocating common and time consuming network processes in a communications processing device, while retaining the ability to handle less time intensive and more varied processing on the host stack. Exception conditions are processed in a conventional manner by the host protocol stack. Most performance-impacting functions of the host protocols can be quickly processed by the specialized hardware while the exceptions are dealt with by the host stacks, the exceptions being sufficiently rare as to negligibly effect overall performance.
Improved methods and apparatus for offloading routine communications protocol processing tasks from the host processor are desired.